It’s been 16 years since the dawn of Business Intelligence version 2.0. Back then, the average business relied on a healthy diet of spreadsheets with pivot tables to solve complex problems such as resource planning, sales forecasting and risk reporting. Larger organizations lucky enough to be cash-rich employed data scientists armed with enterprise-grade BI tools to give them better business insights.
Neither method was perfect. Data remained in silos, accessible in days, not minutes. Methodologies such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), extract-transform-load (ETL), and data warehousing were helpful in computing and storing this data, but limitations on functionality and accessibility remained.
Fast forward to today. Our drive to digitize analytics and provide a scalable platform creates opportunities for businesses to use and access any data source, from the simplest flat files, to the most complex databases, and online data. Advanced analytics tools now come as standard with connectors for multiple disparate data sources and a remote data provider option for loading data from a web address.
These improvements in business analytics capabilities provide industry analysts with a rosy outlook for the BI and analytics market. One is forecasting global revenue in the sector to reach $16.9 billion this year, an increase of 5.2 percent from 2015.
A Better Way to Work
While business leaders are clamouring for more modern analytics tools, what do key stakeholders — marketers and the business analysts who support them, end-users, and of course IT and their development teams — really want in terms of outcomes? Simple: businesses want their analytics easy-to-use, fast, and agile.
Leading technology analysts have commented that the shift to the modern BI and analytics platform has now reached a tipping point, and that transitioning to a modern BI platform provides the opportunity to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources.
Over the last few years, OpenText has established its Analytics software to serve in the context of the application (or device, or workflow) to deliver personalized information, drive user adoption, and delight customers. Our recent Release 16 of the Analytics Suite is helping to enable our vision of using analytics as “A Better Way to Work.”
The Analytics Suite features common, shared services between the two main products — OpenText™ Information Hub (iHub) and OpenText™ Big Data Analytics (BDA) — such as single sign-on, single security model, common access, and shared data. Additionally, iHub accesses BDA’s engine and analysis results to visualize them. The solution includes broadly functional APIs based on REST and JavaScript for embedding. Both iHub and BDA are available deployed either on-premises or as a managed service to serve business and technical users.
Understand and Engage
This focus drives our approach. At a high level, we enable two key use cases (as illustrated below).
First, advanced analytics harnesses the power of your data to help you better understand your market or your customers (or factory or network in an Internet of Things scenario).
Second, you engage with these users and decision makers with data-driven visual information like charts, reports, and dashboards—on the app or device of their choice.
Whether you are looking to build smarter customer applications or harness the power of your big data to beat the competition to market, analytics is the bridge between your digital strategy and business insights that drive smarter decisions—for every user across the enterprise.
Check out the Analytics Suite today and gain deeper insight into your business.
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